The book, Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward, is a testimony on the author’s spiritual journey.
The author grew up rooted in American Evangelicalism and became a journalist for several politically conservative news organizations. Jon’s journalistic talents helped him research and question what he was being told and what he was experiencing.
Through his journey, Jon became disillusioned with the hypocrisy and the cultic behavior of his particular church and of the wider American Evangelical movement. Jon is still a follower of King Jesus.
I really enjoyed this book because Jon and I had many points where we had common experiences of disillusionment.
Although he is 16 years younger than me and I do not know him personally, he and I were in the same area in Maryland outside Washington, DC at the same time and I knew many people who attended the church he attended.
The following are several quotes from the book to give you a taste of his writing. If these quotes offend you, then you probably will not read this book. If these quotes challenge you, then you probably would like this book. As you can see some of these quotes actually are from another book, Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura. I have added this to my Wish List to read in the future.
- “I had been raised as deeply inside American evangelicalism as you could get and had embraced the Christian faith all the way to the core of my being. I had been loved by sainted parents who devoted their lives to God and showed me how to walk the straight and narrow. The kingdom of God wasn’t just words to me. But what I was seeing from the American church in 2016 was at odds with what I had been taught. And when I tried to explain why to people outside the world of regular churchgoers, I got blank stares.”
- “All my life I have been a mearcstapa, or a border-stalker. Mearcstapa is an Old English word used in Beowulf. Painter and author Makoto Fujimura used this term, and his modern translation of border-stalker, to describe those who “are uncomfortable in homogenous groups” and yet are still present in them, and thus they live “on the edge of their groups, going in and out of them.””
- “Fujimura’s writings have shaped my thinking about how to be a Christian and live in the world. His book Culture Care lays out a vision opposed to “culture war,” and in this vision, border-stalkers have an important role: “They can become good Samaritans to a divided culture,” he writes.”
- “The modern world is a violent environment for a border-stalker. It is now the norm to be intolerant of opposing views, to see others as the other: to fear them, to hate them. Black-and-white thinking is everywhere. Nuance is vanishing. Complexity is demonized.”
- “Twenty years ago, I thought that the biggest threats to truth were postmodern relativism and godless liberals. Today, to my shock, my own tribe of Christians has taken a battering ram to truth.”
- “We were taught that anyone not in the church was in “the world.” The world was, pretty obviously to us, a bad place. So it was better if we spent the majority of our time with people from church, doing church things, and not thinking too much about non-church things.”
- “And I could not have comprehended that the Christian culture I was being raised in—separate from my instruction at home—was actually making me and others around me more vulnerable to manipulation by men “whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways.””
- “The seeds of harm were planted with good intentions. The men who shaped my childhood, who formed my mental architecture and my inner life, simply wanted something real. There were women around, of course, but they were considered mostly irrelevant when it came to decision-making.”
- “This way of viewing faith made a big deal of having a clear demarcation in your life, between your days as a pagan rebelling against God and your moment of decision, when you became a child of God. The need for this clear line—before and after—elevated the importance of a statement of faith in a set of beliefs. This approach nudged aside the kind of faith that is a lifelong journey of growth in which one never truly arrives but is constantly seeking and growing and evolving.”
- “Christians were embattled, put upon, even persecuted, and the answer was to “fight” a culture war for a religion based on a God-man who had in his own life on earth taught his followers to turn the other cheek and to be “poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3).”
- “Critical thought, to these charismatic leaders, was an unhealthy questioning of God, and that got in the way of impact. So they sometimes implied that too many questions were a sinful reflex, or Satan’s handiwork, which could keep a Christian from claiming their rightful place in God’s army.”
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